


Letters to Saint Jude

by vash (hanamichi)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gratuitously Hot Voldemort, M/M, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Post-Canon, Slow(ish) Burn, my favourite trope - captive voldemort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:26:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26046493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanamichi/pseuds/vash
Summary: A story where Tom falls from (dis)grace right into Harry's arms.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 21
Kudos: 89





	Letters to Saint Jude

**Author's Note:**

> \- locking Tom up again, he deserves it  
> \- he’s the omega in this, though that doesn’t mean he’s the bottom (at least not most of the time...)  
> \- I apologise for starting so many fics without finishing them...I have a good idea of where I’m going with this one tho. Even the epilogue is already mapped out. Please don’t give up on me!  
> \- I didn’t add some tags because those would be spoilers but there isn’t going to be any non-con, underage, violence etc. I’ll add more specific tags at the beginning of each chapter tho.  
> \- thanks to my beta who helped me even though she doesn’t like omegaverse!

_I didn’t want this, not  
this (but listen, quietly,  
to want is what bodies do_

_and now we are ghosts only)._

**Marina Tsvetaeva** , from “Poem of the End”

I.

  
  


They gave him a cottage by some shore, and it was more than mercy, it was a solitary temple for a hated deity; the last statue for the captured emperor. These few acres of land, the size to which his empire had shrunk.

One third pity, one third safe keeping, one third pragmatism.

Where else should they stuff him, the dwindling Dark Lord? Can’t let a tiger who can’t hunt on its own out into the wild, not with so many men wanting its pelt. They’d slice him up and do him in the old pagan ways; his flesh scattered all across England if the wizards of Britain had their say. His spirit tied to the Earth by Harry, his one remaining lighthouse.

“Am I supposed to feel grateful?” Voldemort asked, and Harry answered:

“I don’t care what you feel.”

There was still dust on his shoulders, dried blood on his cheek. Both of them bruised and Voldemort astonished at his defeat. Learning to breathe that prisoner’s air.

Hermione was fixing her broken ankle and Ron was looking after her, glancing at them, anxious, from time to time.

“You’re not getting a better deal, though. They all want revenge on you and I think you earned that. If they get here I won’t stop them.”

Tom knew it, too.

Watching that skinny boy who doomed him and was now saving him, toying with the idea of dignity, of dying a half-death at the hands of a crowd who’d hunt him down. But dignity was stale. He’d always choose life.

He muttered a small _yes_ , an inaudible, choked thing that was so unlike him that he did it again with mockery, offering his wrists, raising his chin just a tad, carrying what was left of his pride like the clothes on a fugitive’s back:

“Save me then, little hero.”

Harry smiled a small smile of relief. Perhaps he didn’t want to be made a murderer by proxy, perhaps even now he hadn’t grown used to the sight of blood. Perhaps he thought there was still hope for Tom Riddle, while he lived; so, they take him away like thieves carrying a painting and keep him in a place no one else can touch.

  
  


“So now what, we babysit him for the rest of our lives?” Ron asked, stuffing his mouth full of their first warm meal in days.

“Just the foreseeable future,” Harry responded, feeling almost as hungry, balancing the plate on his thighs. No table yet, no chairs, just the cot on a room used by their prisoner.

Ron cursed.

“This is mental. It’s bloody _Voldemort_ we’re talking about.”

“A defenceless, wandless Voldemort who’s so covered in runes he can’t even cast a _Lumos_ ,” countered Hermione. She had done it herself while he was unconscious, branding him carefully with enough symbols to keep his magic sedated and trapped. The way his body gleamed and then waned when she was done, like a star dying of its own light.

“It’s still _Voldemort_!” Ron shrieked. “And it’s just us three—”

“We did some damage though, just us three.” Harry said.

“Think about all the knowledge he has!” Hermione argued, passionate to the point of spilling some of her soup. “It would all be lost if he died! Think about all we could learn—”

“Dark magic! Dark spells! Is that something you wanna learn? And why the fuck do you think he’d tell us anything? We’re his _jailers_ , he _hates_ us!

“We need to try, Ron,” said Hermione while Ron bit angrily at a bread roll, which he used to point at her after a brief glance at Harry.

“Look,” he said, “that’s all fine and dandy but we’re not even taking into consideration the ethic aspect.” He looked around, waiting for the protests. When none came, he carried on: “Doe he deserve all this? A nice little house on the beach, space to walk, sunlight…”

“Do you think we should throw him in Azkaban, then?” Harry asked.

“Not as it was before. But now, without Dementors…”

“Even Grindelwald got something better than Azkaban.”

“I’m just saying, he killed people. He killed people we know, he—Harry, I don’t need to be telling you all of this.”

“No. You’re right, he doesn’t deserve it.” Harry cut another piece of bread as he talked. Something hallow in his chest, but the good kind. The sort of indifference that comes with feeling sleepy, or hungry. After almost eighteen years he felt he had earned a sort of reprieve. All else could wait, even the man asleep on the room next to where they were eating. Even the implications of having him there, of allowing him that sort of peace. “But he’s lived somewhere dark and awful before and it didn’t turn out well to anyone.”

“You lived somewhere dark and awful too,” Ron pointed out. “It didn’t make you go around killing people.”

Harry stopped chewing and wanted to hold Ron and hug him, and thank him for that affection which, being so unprompted, so earnest, was all the more precious. He also wanted to just finish his dinner and go to sleep. For a year or two, dreamless.

“I don’t have a good reason, Ron,” he said, not to shut him up, but because, in truth, there wasn’t one, not one he could translate from the unknowable feelings he felt. He wanted this to be a world where Voldemort could be saved. And even for that there are many good rational arguments, a few great ones. But the want itself might be some leftover madness from a lifetime of ownership. How could he explain that to Ron? He can’t and he won’t because not everything should be put into words. Some of his heart needs to stay soundless.

Instead, he finishes it with his regular, easy answer: “I just think everyone deserves a second chance, that’s all.”

Ron grunted but ate silently along with Hermione. Truth is the war made none of them killers so even with the Devil, there’s some hesitation. Imagine going into that room, strangling him in his sleep. The fucking mess of it all. There’s a persistent softness in them, like baby fat. They’re still teenagers.

“You two head back,” Harry told them after they’re done with supper. “I’ll stay to make sure he’s alright.”

“Are you sure?” Hermione asked “I can stay here with you if you want—perhaps it would be better, they won’t miss me as much as they’ll miss you.”

“I’m sure. I wouldn’t risk it leaving him alone with any of you for now. He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and I’m the only one he won’t try to kill.” At Hermione’s alarmed look, he adds: “It will be fine. Do you have his hair?”

She nods.

“Mate,” Ron said, with the accumulated solemnity of the past year, they – this triad – have almost died for each other many times now. “If this is too much – you tell us, ok?”

Harry smiled. “I will.”

Hermione kissed the top of his head and whispered:

“We’ll be back in three days.”

  
  


  
  


They’ve never been alone before, the two of them. Harry sat with his back to the wall near the window and watched Tom on the bed; no candle, just the white hue of moonlight on his face, his fingertips, his hair. There’s the calming thought, but maybe it’s just sleepiness: that beasts also need rest, and when they rest, they dream, and not all dreams must be of carnage.

“Tom,” Harry murmured, for no reason at all. Voldemort’s fingers twitch like he’s heard the call, like he’s been waiting to hear it all his life, his name called out like that.

But he doesn’t wake and soon Harry falls asleep as well.

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


It’s not the sun that awakes him, nor the thirst. Three days gone, he feels it in his limbs. Immortality was still his, but funny how it shocked him, all the time he missed. He remembers the mornings like shifts of warmth and one delicate finger under his chin and the cold water on his lips. _There you go,_ the boy’s voice would say with ludicrous kindness.

He woke up from a dream so good it dissolved and left him with the recent memory of defeat when the soles of his feet touched the floor. His hand opening and closing around a wand that wasn’t there anymore, his lips mouthing a spell he could no longer cast. And his body mad and useless and human and banal and the sharpness of his fall rushing in, every unforgiving detail: Hogwarts burning, Bellatrix dead, all his Horcruxes destroyed but one.

When he looks up, he sees him, dozing against the wall, glasses askew on his delicate, pretty face. Tom roars and seizes him before the boy wakes up fully; pulls him by the collar and wraps a hand around his neck.

The boy gazes at him patiently, his hand over Tom’s. They’ve made a deal, he remembers.

“Want some breakfast?” Harry asks, and Tom lets him go.

It’s an offense and a farce when they get to the kitchen, and Harry, dutiful little jailer, takes a jug of water and a piece of bread, broke it in two and offers it to Tom. The metaphor isn’t lost, not even to someone godless like him and he wants to slap it out of that hand and growl: _boy, I’d crucify you too if I could. I’d leave you bleeding there for days._

But beggars can’t be choosers and that’s what he is now, hungry like any other sinner. He eats slowly. His stomach curled and lazy inside him with three days of fasting. When he stepped out of that cauldron four years ago, he was glad he could eat again, but for the first few days he couldn’t keep anything down. His body purging all food offered as if refusing to be flesh. As if a stranger to its own want.

“Through that door – that’s the bathroom. No hot water for now, we’re fixing that. We’re lucky it’s summer, but if it’s cold you can heat some water on the stove.” Harry moves around but there’s so little to show; this house naked to the bone, only them as adornment.

“There’s another bedroom but we’re gonna turn it into a study room or something…there’s a shelf, ‘Mione will bring some books. We’re hoping for a garden. Maybe even a henhouse at some point.”

“How quaint.” Tom mocks. “So that’s my retirement plan then, become a little farmer.”

“Oh, I think that’s gonna take a while,” Harry says wide-eyed and innocent, his sarcasm so easy that it’s almost imperceptible. “You’ll need to learn things other than killing people for that.”

“You child. You brat. You think I’ll stay here for long? My Death Eaters—”

“Most of them jumped ship. And the loyal ones are either dead or arrested too,” the boy tells him and his voice was soft like an angel of ill-tidings. All this time between them, all this pain and the boy manages to be so at ease. “No one’s coming for you, Tom.”

He turns away before Voldemort can say anything – his face a little tanned and his hair longer than ever.

There was a sound Voldemort knows well in the distance, the doing and undoing of a barrier and the echo of Apparition.

Harry looked at him. “I think they’re back – wait here.”

Which, of course, Voldemort disobeys. The boy runs ahead and Tom walks as slowly as he ate, testing the firmness of his legs, the extent of the damage. His magic hums inside him like the water dwelling in the ocean’s deepest. If only he could call it forth. Make whole continents disappear.

The day is very warm and he puts a hand over his eyes for a moment as he crosses the threshold and tastes the salt in the breeze. The coast seen through the shimmer of the barrier and nothing but unpeopled English land in sight.

Then there’s the Weasley, the muggleborn girl and Harry with his back turned to him as if his fangs are all broken and he was no longer fit for the business of mauling. The other two at least have the decency of looking apprehensive.

“What did you bring?” Harry asks, eyeing the small bag Hermione’s carrying.

“Enough to make this place liveable. I thought he’d be still sleeping.”

“Maybe we should knock him out again.” Ron nervously suggests.

“ _He_ can hear you.” Voldemort announces, approaching them. “Are you afraid, Weasley? You should be. I will escape sooner or later and the wrath I shall bring upon you will unlike anything you’ve ever seen. But I’m merciful and willing to spare magical blood. You are a pure-blood after all and if you help me—”

“Stop trying to tempt Ron with this bigoted bullshit.” Hermione said and though there was some fear in her voice, her anger is enough to outshine it.

Ron looks at him and shrugged; the movement and the girl seemed to take some, if not all, the power Voldemort’s gravitas still casted on him. And at least for now, Tom’s just a thin man in his thirties with uncombed hair and nothing to his name, just an orphaned devil they have to feed and take care of because who else will?

“Won’t work mate.” Ron says and follows Hermione into the house.

Voldemort looks at Harry and sees him smiling.

“I was expecting you to try that at some point.” The boy tells him, good-humoured. The world so far changed. When did he grow up? Voldemort asks himself. He was never supposed to grow up.

  
  


  
  


She pulls from her bag: tomato seeds, linen, toothbrushes and toothpaste, two different types of soap, wooden chairs, jars and pots and candles, shirts, a pillow, blankets, jeans in faded blue, potions of many kinds, butter, milk, boxes and the books filling them, books and more books all by muggle authors, potatoes, eggs, plates and forks, a tv set and dvds, oranges, bacon, a sewing kit, clothes worn already by other owners and given away, spices, a cassette player and tapes. Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Debussy and Beethoven but Ella Fitzgerald too, and Queen and Pink Floyd and Johnny Cash and The Cranberries and Billie Holiday and many others along with others things to fill a modest home. Parchment. Ink. A dark, old coat.

They all sit in silence for a while with the secreted hoard between them, before Hermione and Harry start to put it all away. There’s a table now, and a cabinet and an oven.

“We’ll bring a fridge next time,” Hermione says. “The food is enchanted against rotting though.” She looks at Ron, who is eating his second helping of bacon and eggs with toast. “Ron? A little help?”

Ron swallows. “I’m keeping an eye on ‘im.”

Voldemort sits across from him and smiles while his eyes search from something to murder a person with, but there’s no knife, no edge, just the needle on the sewing kit. And he could blind the boy in front of him but would it be worth the trouble? It’s probably spelled anyway to be as harmless to the world as he is right now.

He doesn’t touch anything, not even the food, which is warm and looks good, cooked by his Horcrux’ hands.

“I suppose this little set up isn’t sanctioned by the Ministry.”

“Not officially,” Harry answers. “Most people think you’re dead. There’s even a body.”

“Polyjuice potion.” Hermione adds.

“Where did all of this come from?”

“Charity.”

His fingers curl over the shadow of his wand, the ghost of a lifetime lover. His brow furrowed very slightly. He looks at the muggleborn and she’s very beautiful and poised and dignified even though there‘s the lingering fear. She holds his gaze, her spine a taut line, her chin tilted just a little. She wouldn’t reach his collarbone if he was to stand up. Even Ron, the tallest among them, falls short a few inches.

“What’s your goal then? Is this also _charity_?”

“She wants to learn from you whatever you might teach.” Harry spoke to him before Hermione could speak, his back against the sink. “I don’t want you to die, but I also don’t want you out in the world either. Ron is along for the ride. Against his will, mostly.”

“I think they’re both nuts.” Ron mutters.

“So not revenge,” Voldemort teases, looking at his Horcrux “Are you squandering the chance of doing to me all that I did to you?”

“We’re not like you.” Hermione points out.

“We’re interested in seeing if you can be fixed.” Harry carries on. “If your soul can be put back together. I’ve read it hurts like hell, so maybe that counts as torture.”

His plate went flying, cracking against the wall and spilling on the floor. A waste of good food, the eggs, the bacon, the bread. Hermione yelps and Ron stands almost as quickly as Voldemort did.

Sometimes even at the zoo children get scared. His fangs bigger so close they are to him now. But it’s to Harry that Tom directs all his fury:

“I don’t need to be _fixed_! I don’t need your pity or your charity! I am powerful!” Voldemort roars, thumping a hand against the centre of his chest, as if to find and evoke the lost proof of his words “I _am_ powerful! More than you could ever dream!”

“Was,” Harry corrects him calmly. “Not anymore.”

Tom falters. If only he could do it with his hands. If he could deny Harry all his claims.

Ron points dhis wand to him and Tom turns to him, made stupid by his anger, but Weasley was stupid too. It won’t amount to much, he knew it even as he attacked the boy and grabbed his wrist, but he needed them to see he wasn’t hollow. There’s still so much bite in him. His fingers grasp the wand but his touch is barren. It is just wood in his hand. It’s a worse blow than the punch Weasley lands on his cheek and the _impedimenta_ that hits his back and the darkness that follows.

  
  


“I think we should try,” Harry begins, but pauses and laughs a little.

“What.” Ron asks, looking for a reason to laugh too.

“I was going to say we should try to make him _good_ but…”

Ron doesn’t laugh but something in him unwinds, as if he was relieved that his best friend is not insane enough to think so kindly, so hopefully, of the man they guard.

“Maybe set realistic goals? Decent is gonna be hard enough already.”

“How do we measure that?” Hermione asks, brow furrowed with annoyance but also excitement at the homework cut out for her. “We can teach him things I guess, but how can we test him? It’s not like the NEWTs”

“Right now he’d get grades so bad he’d be expelled.” Ron points out and Harry chuckles with him.

“I’m serious,” Hermione continues. “Decency is an ongoing choice a person makes throughout life – and even the best of us fail sometimes. And with him kept in a controlled environment how can we know he’s truly changed?”

“What do you suggest? We give him a textbook on _goodness_ and then let him out in the world, give him a wand and hope he won’t kill the first person he sees?”

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” Harry says. “And in any case even if we could turn him into a good person I don’t think we should ever let him go free again.”

“We don’t even know how.” Hermione sighs. “How do you teach someone like him, someone his age, after everything he’s done, to be good or even decent?”

“Maybe religion? You know, teach him to love Jesus and all.” Ron suggests.

“That’s assuming he can be taught how to love in the first place.”

“I don’t think religion would work on him.” Harry tells them.

“This is hard.” Ron complains. But what hasn’t been, before, to them? They look at each other, at the unperturbed youth on their faces and Harry feels guilty that they should be furrowing their brows over Voldemort’s continuing existence. But at the same time it was in moments like this when he’s loved them best, when they solved together what the world threw their way. “If only there was a way to bottle up goodness.” Ron continues. “Like a love potion but instead of love it makes people good.”

Harry ponders on it a little, picture the irony of a leash passed down, murdered father to murderer son. Tom: an unsettling sweetness to his smile, a wizard-made sainthood. How cloudy his eyes would be.

“If only.” The boy echoes. But if there was he’d pour it down the drain. They won’t take the easy way out, Voldemort and him. He won’t learn the imperius to teach Tom how to pray.

“We need to manage it without drugging him.” Hermione says finally. “It’s going to be very difficult.”

“But not impossible.” Harry says.

  
  


Twilight came so late and lazily he forgot to light the candles, to turn on the lights. Tom’s room is dark when Harry finally kneels next to its door and presses his ear to the wood like a child hoping for a secret of adulthood. He has all the secrets of adulthood he needs now, all but one. He’s lived a hundred this last year, but he still thought to knock, to be kind like a child.

“Tom? Are you awake?”

He felt the answer before it came, the pale notes of movement inside. They locked him unconscious in the room after he attacked Ron and there he stayed the entire day while they discussed him. Now Ron and Hermione are gone and they were alone again.

Tom can be very silent when he moves but Harry can tell he is awake, that he is listening. He is sitting with his back against the door, and if not for the wood between them, Harry could be have touched him.

“Hermione and Ron went back. How are you feeling?”

“Hungry.” Comes the answer.

“I thought you’d be.” He pust his hand in the place where he imagines the centre of Tom’s back is, and his imagination even conjures some warmth. It’s always different when they are alone. He feels his most truthful when it’s just the two of them. He peels away the diplomat and stops pretending he still has any fear of him. “Behave? Please? I never want to starve you again.”

“Why not? It’s a decent enough torture.”

“That’s not why you’re here.”

“Then _why_ am I here?” Tom bites out, finally sounding tired and exasperated after the previous irony. “What is this farce—you can’t truly have gone through all this trouble to _fix_ me.”

“I’ll open the door now and we can talk while we eat. You will not attack me again.”

Harry takes Tom’s silence for compliance.

Tom hadn’t yet risen when Harry opened the door, one knee drawn up and his arms in the air where the movement was cut in half, for a moment he has to look up to Harry’s eyes. And then he’s tall again but still looking like someone abandoned, like an instrument that outlived its purpose or a house constructed too close to the sea, now drowning.

“It’s all pain and torture with you? It’s it really that hard to imagine that someone would try to be kind to you?” Harry’s voice is very soft.

“It’s hard to imagine that someone would be you.”

“I’ve always been good at defying your expectations.”

“Perhaps it would have been to leave me there. This doesn’t feel like kindness.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Harry exclaims. “You’d take life, any life, over death. I’ve seen you do it. I’ve seen you at your worst and most pitiful and this is not it. Would you rather be a ghost, dripping unicorn’s blood from someone else’s mouth? There’s no one to make rituals to get your body back now. You’re standing there unharmed while so many died because of you and you fucking complain? This _is_ kindness, and you don’t deserve it.”

“You sure little saint? Is there nothing in you that wants me in pain?” Tom goaded him, venomous, his fists clenched like Harry’s. “No one is watching. You could do whatever you want with me.”

It’s true. He could do whatever he wanted to Voldemort, unseen, unjudged, now that Voldemort belongs to him from head to toe. He could set upon Voldemort all the pain he’s caused, he could pay it back thrice-folded and the Earth would die a few times without missing him or the Gaunts or the Riddles. Voldemort was beyond any jurisdiction or protection but the mercy of his Horcrux. He could do it. Kick him around a little, break a few bones, see how tall he stands crawling on a broken leg, puking some blood. He can’t cast the cruciatus but he has a foot and Tom a mouth full of teeth. Step on the wrist he used to hold his wand until it shatters. Who would blame him for it? He was a boy of fourteen, tied up in a graveyard, surrounded by grown men who laughed while Voldemort tortured him. He was mourning before he could speak. Even the Bible prayed retribution.

But he won’t. Hermione is right. Harry was not cut from that cloth.

Tom doesn’t know that, not entirely, and in that deep maroon of his eyes Harry thinks he can see, for the first time, the bright, maddening light of fear, now that they are alone as alone can be. 

He’s smiling a mocking smile but there it is, in the distance he puts between himself and Harry, in the sharp notes of his voice. Perhaps he’s trying to picture what Dumbledore meant by _a fate worse than death_. Maybe is not pain in his mind, at least not the type Harry was thinking of, but the unveiling of the secret he’s cradled all these years, the secret he’s unsure Harry knows of.

Harry sighs, pushes back his hair and lets the anger dissipate. Tries not to be offended by Tom possible line of thinking: that if he knew of his secret he’d act on it. It’s not personal. What wizard wouldn’t, in his position? With Tom being as beautiful and guilty of so many sins as he is now?

“There’s probably a part of me that would like to see you suffer, yes.” Harry admits slowly, before he looks at Tom again. “I mean, I didn’t forgive you. But I won’t hurt you. That’s not why you are here.”

“Then why—”

“I don’t know.” Harry lied. He couldn’t say _: because you’re mine. Because I’m yours. Because I can’t stand the thought of another wizard hurting or killing you_ _._ “I don’t know why I saved you. Maybe it’s because you were right and we’re alike and it scares me that I could have ended up like you so I want to fix you because if it was me I’d want a second chance too. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Tom is silent and it occurs to Harry that without legilimency he’s amputated of one of his senses. He’s been threading this world so used to honesty because honesty was a fruit in a low branch, as easy to him as breathing, even when taken forcefully. Now he has to look at Harry and trust without seeing.

“Besides, if I was going to torture you, I would never starve you.” Harry tries, wanting to see how he responds to the truth when it was given so freely. “That’s what my relatives used to do to me when I was growing up.”

Tom’s body shifts. Just slightly, his waist moving inside that wrinkled white shirt.

“I never knew that.”

“Well I didn’t have time to tell you about my sad childhood while I was dodging killing curses from you, did I?”

His tone is not unkind, just a little impatient. He could drill Tom with all his sins, all the ways in which he is the bane of his life, but to what end? Like kicking a dead dog.

Tom opens his mouth, closes it again. Would he use it as proof of how evil and twisted muggles are? Maybe he’s thinking of it. _Join me,_ Harry, he would say _. Kiss the hem of my robe and let us play at killing together._

But none of that comes, so Harry fills the silence:

“Now I’m hungry. Let’s eat, ok?”

  
  


  
  


The night is warm enough that they take their plates outsides and sit beneath the stars. Once more Tom eats slowly and only little, wetting his bread on the soup Harry made for them.

“How did you know about my Horcruxes?” he asks after a while, testing the extent of Harry’s openness.

“Dumbledore showed me some memories of you from other people. He already had the theory that Horcruxes were how you became immortal and we confirmed it when I got Slughorn’s memory of a conversation he had with you.”

“What did he show you?”

“Stuff from your youth, your childhood. The day he met you. The day you asked him if you could teach at Hogwarts. Other people’s memories, like your uncle’s.”

“You probably think you know everything about me.”

“I don’t.” Harry says, looking at Tom. There’s the sound of waves crashing down on the shore and a breeze from the sea and he wonders if Tom is flushed from anger or from embarrassment. He can’t tell here in the dark. “I hope you’ll tell me, one day.”

Tom scoffs.

They finish eating and then Harry stretched, lacing his fingers together and turning his palms upwards to the sky until his bones sigh. He’s barefoot these days, waiting for his body to regain some of the weight he lost when he was a fugitive. He’s enjoying, carefully, the ease of this new life. He’s long-limbed and beautiful and Voldemort looks at him like he’s never seen something like it. 

“It’s too late; I’ll go in the morning.” He smiles at Tom. “I won’t sleep in your room tonight, though.”

Tom looks away and finishes eating the last of his bread, soaking up the remains of the soup with it until the plate is clean.

“Brat,” he calls, “How can you be so sure I won’t strangle you in your sleep?” But his voice is soft. His words are weightless. From his mouth this could be goodnight.

Harry responds in kind: “That would be too stupid even for you.”

  
  


  
  


Voldemort stays outside for a long time after that, even after all the warmth was gone from the plate on his lap and the chill sets in. He has never been good at naming what goes on inside him nor was he ever interested in that. He’s familiar with rage and some joy, he knows despair, he knows fear, he knows pride. He’s even cried a few tears in his time. But he’s never greeted this restlessness, never shook its hand.

Harry is asleep in the other room when he walked in, his breathing soft like a child’s. Fearless, with his door ajar, as if he isn’t sharing this roof with a killer. As if he trusts the old tiger not to do what tigers have done since the beginning.

Perhaps he is right, because all Tom does is run his fingers lightly through the boy’s hair and watch him sleep for a moment. It would be so easy, though. The boy has such a lovely neck. But it’s late, and his claws are sheathed.

Perhaps he’ll become a ghost, truly, here where the world is so quiet. Only the sound of the waves and his own thoughts. He’s always liked the sea, ever since he was a child, he liked its unboundedness. Like a metaphor for power or for life, he used to think. But now it means time, and though he doesn’t feel it yet, he could be drown by it, by these useless days. This is not the eternity he killed for.

  
  


  
  


The months pass quickly, however. He sleeps most of the time and it feels like convalescing from a great disease, as if defeat could be cured by rest, by patience. His three jailors come by seldom, always in pairs, to bring him supplies or fix minor things around the house. He’s expected to cook for himself and to keep the place clean and learn how to use his hands to live a life without magic. He does so, from time to time, cutting carrots and taking showers and brushing his teeth without looking in the mirror and trying to taste the food he makes carelessly because what’s the point. He lost. He had his fingers on the edge of a king’s throne and he slipped. His hair grows so long and he loses weight until the jeans – jeans! – he wears are slack on his hips and his face is gaunt and unhealthy.

  
  


  
  


And once, Harry came when he was sleeping and touched his shoulder.

“It’s my birthday today,” he told him, as if this is of any relevance to him. “Sorry we’ve been coming so little. But we’ve been fixing the mess you made, so it’s not really our fault.”

He groans, rolling to the other side and letting the boy’s voice fade as he fell asleep again.

  
  


  
  


He postpones the grand plan he means to come up with to free himself, imprison his Horcrux, kill the other two pests and take over Wizarding Britain. He’ll get to it, one of these days.

When he’s awake long enough to be hopeful, he pictures his Death Eaters finding him here and releasing him. He wonders if his pride would allow him to be rescued like a princess in a tale, if he’d be desperate enough to take any hand that would extend to his. But these musings never last long. He’s seen most of them killed, or scattered. Harry was telling the truth – no one is coming for him.

When he dreams it’s often of his mother. She’s always beautiful and alive and that’s how he knows from the start he’s asleep.

  
  


  
  


He gets no kiss for his troubles. When Harry woke him he does so by throwing a bucket of water on him. Voldemort is as happy as any other wet cat and he hisses and curses: _I’ll kill your entire family you little wankstain,_ to which Harry replies, _it’s a bit late for that now._

“You stink.” Harry informs him later. “Have you at least changed the sheets at some point?”

“Once.”

“Let’s wash them.”

He pulls the sheets to his nose, and there is the musk of his accumulated sweat and the general smell of his unkempt days. Beneath it, something else. Faint but relentless, the nuisance not even fourteen years a ghost rid him of. He had always been a fastidious one, ever since childhood, but sleep seemed more important, these last months, than being clean.

He bundles up the sheets and follows Harry.

“What is that?” Tom asked when Harry shows him the metal box and tells him to put the bed clothing inside.

“It’s a washing machine. Ron and I brought it last time we came here. Don’t you remember?”

“I was probably sleeping.”

“Were you hibernating?”

“That’s during the winter, ignorant child.”

“Wash your shirt, too,” Harry says, and Tom, not seeing why not, pulls it over his head and throws it inside the muggle invention. He looks at Harry but his gaze is fixed on the wall ahead, his body rigid and his cheeks flushed with summer.

“What month is it?” Tom asks.

“September.” Harry answers.

“Shouldn’t you be at Hogwarts?”

“I’m not going. Ron and I figured that defeating the most powerful dark wizard of all time is a good enough replacement for our last year. Hermione is going, though.” He rubbed his left calf with the front of his right foot. “Are you hungry? I brought cauldron cakes.”

He makes tea and they sit outside at a wooden table with mismatched chairs. More rubbish from charity. The cottage a thing still unfinished, pieced together with borrowed limbs from different homes. It’s been so long since he’d had cauldron cakes he forgot what they tasted like. There is some nostalgia; his first train ride to Hogwarts. The cake was the cheapest item on the list and he munched on them on the way, alone in that cabin, waiting for life, real life this time, to finally meet him at the end of that travel.

“What will you do then?” he asks Harry.

“I am thinking of becoming an Auror.”

Voldemort scoffs. Of course.

“What?” The boy interjects, as if it matters what Voldemort thinks of it. “I’d be good at it.”

“It would be terribly predictable of you.”

“Nothing wrong with being predictable for once.”

“Aren’t you good at Quidditch? Do that. Pays more.”

“I don’t have to decide it now anyway.” The boy tells him, as if he was a friend or a relative. “I feel like I have all the time in the world.”

Now, in the afterlife. Life after him—real life rising cloudless and bright like this day to meet the Boy-Who-Lived, so he can finally do the living and not just the surviving. With this last ghost locked away. Voldemort’s too lethargic yet, hasn’t shaken hibernation off like the bear that shakes off the leaves from the nest in which he dreamt, to appreciate fully the conversation. He knows the pain will come soon and he’ll not be able to fend it off by sleep anymore. He’ll be alive in a world where his Horcrux is free to do with life whatever he wants to do. And it will hurt to sit by him and be kept when he’s always envisioned himself the keeper. He’d give Harry a gentle prison too. Perhaps as large as this one.

They finish their tea and Harry pushes another cake in Tom’s direction even though he hasn’t finished his first yet.

“You look terrible, you know. When was the last time you ate?”

“Two days ago. I think.”

“Is this a hunger strike or something?”

“Not at all.”

“Why were you sleeping so much?”

“I’ve slept very little these last four years. Two hours a night. Sometimes less. Maybe my body is catching up.”

“You can’t do that anymore. One of us is coming here at least once a week starting next week and we need you awake during the day.”

How annoying that tone, as if Tom is a schoolboy. So sweet it would be to slap him on that beautiful cheek, not too hard but hard enough to shock.

“You know, for your rehabilitation.”

Harry continues.

Tom laughs, and it is a short and sudden sound.

“Haven’t you given up on this stupid idea?”

“It’s not stupid. It’s your only chance.”

“My only chance for what?” Tom turns to him. Harsh in his voice and his words because only his voice and words can be weaponised nowadays, not even his size – and even thin like a parchment he’s still stronger than Harry – can put fear back into this boy’s heart. “What’s your goal here? I play house with you and your little friends tell you I love muggles and I won’t ever again hurt anyone and you let me go free to find myself a wife, have a kid and go to church every Sunday?”

“My only goal is for you to feel remorse. And that’s the only way you’ll ever be free. Not just from here but from this disgusting, ugly thing you call your life.”

Tom tries or a laugh again, but it comes out a brutish noise, from some place in his chest he can’t entirely control.

“You’re a fool, Harry Potter.”

“You’re the fool,” Harry says, frustrated, childish. “Besides, would it be so bad? This life you mocked – the wife, the kid, even the fucking church on Sundays, would that be so bad? Were you sleeping two hours a night these last four years because your life was fun? Because you were happy?”

“There are things greater than happiness and _fun_ you dim-witted child.”

“Let me guess, power?”

“Godhood. That’s what you robbed me of.”

Harry stands up and looks at him, at this untranslatable creature. His face tilted (such a pretty vision he is, especially now that he’s angry) in the fashion of his maker and he was silent until he found in Tom something that softened his frown, that turned the beauty of his expression into the horrid pity of saints.

Tom, wounded in turn, doesn’t want to be pitied, but he finds himself too much a coward to ask what Harry had seen that brought forth that pity.

“Some god you’d be,” the boy says softly, and then leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments keep me motivated so I’d love if you leave one!


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